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So I went to the Tuam Babies meeting to have my say, and then I realised I shouldn’t have one

I guess most of you already know the background to this. (For those unfamiliar with this story, be assured of its international significance. Check out, for example, this New York Times feature. Or this BBC Podcast. Or just go read Wikipedia.)

I’m from Tuam. This whole issue disturbs me on several levels. And the prospect of a cover-up is so very real. So I attended. And I said my piece.

The meeting was supposed to gauge opinion on what to do with the site: (a) leave everything as it is but erect a memorial to tell the world how much we care; or (b) fully excavate the mass grave, exhume and identify the remains, and return the lost loved ones to their grieving families and enable them to rest in peace after a formal and appropriate burial.

Spoiler alert — I was rooting for option (b).

Let’s cut to the chase. What we are dealing with here is a mass grave, one containing the remains of abused persons, people discarded as second-class citizens, coercively separated from their families, born in captivity, and denigrated with the zeal that only religious sanctimony and god-fearing hubris can muster.

It seems simply unconscionable that any humane society would respond to the revelation that nearly 800 babies have been interred in an unmarked grave — a septic tank, no less — and say, ‘Well…let’s just leave them there.’

And yet that is what was being proposed for Tuam.

* * *

On Monday night, Katherine Zappone, Ireland’s Minister for Children and Youth Affairs hosted the meeting, ostensibly a ‘public consultation’ to help her department to decide what to do with the site.

Yes, you heard correctly. The government are asking members of the public what to do with an unexpectedly discovered unmarked mass grave containing hundreds of unidentified remains.

As one attendee asked the Minister to her face, “What if a dead body was discovered in my garden? Would the police come around to ask me should they investigate?”

(Can you just imagine: “Would you mind if we retrieved the corpse? Or would you prefer we just leave it there in your garden forever? After all, it is your garden…“)

The idea of consultation is ridiculous. At best this is the scene of a catastrophe. In any other mass-casualty catastrophe, bodies would be retrieved and returned to families for proper burials. At worst — and actually this is most likely with Tuam — it is a crime scene. I am not a fan of CSI, but even I know you don’t ask bystanders whether or not you should cordon off and investigate a crime scene.

* * *

In fairness, it seemed to me that Minister Zappone personally wants to have all the remains exhumed, identified, and returned to families. The problem isn’t what the Minister would personally prefer. The problem is that the question was even being put.

The consultation approach creates multiple adverse consequences:

It creates unnecessary jeopardy, and potential conflict, by allowing at least some people to believe they have a right to prevent the authorities from exhuming these remains and exposing the full extent of what went on in Tuam. No doubt there will be people who want to not think about this whole issue. No doubt there will be some who want to cover it up. They will prefer if the authorities just walk away and leave well enough alone. But here’s the thing: criminal justice is not a democratic process. After all, sometimes the criminals — and their apologists — are in a majority. The whole infrastructure of abuse that the Irish Mother and Baby homes represent is simply a case in point.

It invites spurious rationalizing to support alternate courses of action, even when those courses of action are morally unjustified. For example, at the meeting in Tuam, Minister Zappone reported that her advisers were raising questions about whether the government has the legal authority to excavate the site. They told her that the coroner might first need evidence that a crime had been committed, or that unnatural deaths had occurred. But this logic falls on at least two counts: (a) in many cases you can’t accumulate such evidence unless you excavate a site and examine the remains in detail; and (b) it is always justified to retrieve bodies from disaster sites even when no crime has been committed, so the whole criminality dimension is moot. It’s a red herring. But raising the question in the first place just invites people to lob in their red herrings. It’s what bureaucrats (especially those who want to save the expense of an excavation) like to do.

* * *

Monday’s meeting followed publication of a hastily organised consultation survey conducted by Galway county council. That survey suggested that, while most survivor groups and relatives of those previously incarcerated in the Home wanted the site to be excavated, most local people wanted to memorialise rather than exhume.

That survey finding just doesn’t ring true to me. And when they heard it, it didn’t ring true to a lot of people resident in the town. So there was quite a bit of anger in the room on Monday night. Of the two hundred or so people who turned up, only one person said they wanted memorialisation and not excavation. Another man said he thought excavation was “pointless”, but he didn’t say it shouldn’t happen.

And that was it. Everyone else said very clearly — often very emotionally, passionately, and heart-rendingly — that they favoured complete excavation, exhumation, identification, and return. The consensus was utterly unambiguous.

Many mentioned how offended they were at the council’s claim that local people wanted to look the other way.

The vox populi is clear on this one (even though — to repeat myself — criminal justice is not a democratic process.)

* * *

Some people had speculated that the entire exercise had been contrived simply to cultivate local dissent, and so give the authorities an excuse to take whatever decision they wished. But in the end, Monday’s meeting gave them no such cover. The sentiment of the meeting was essentially unanimous: GET THESE PEOPLE OUT OF THE GROUND.

The media had been excluded (without a convincing rationale having been offered), but there were tweets. Oh boy, were there tweets. Here is one comprehensive thread:

Of course, the media ban did not prevent the media from reporting. And so obviously the main result of that was, you guessed it, misreporting. For example, this is from today’s Irish Times:

Local Fine Gael representative Cllr Peter Roche was at the meeting on Monday night, and he highlighted the fact that there were varying views on what should happen at the site and how sensitive an issue it was for the people of Tuam.

“It is a very emotional subject and there are no winners. There is no other way to describe it other than it’s very difficult to take sides in it. It is very, very complex,” said Mr Roche.

But Mr Roche (who, I should point out, seemed to have been pretty invisible on the night) is being overly vague when he says “there were varying views” on what should happen at the site. Because, quite simply, there were NOT varying views on what should happen at the site.

Again, to repeat, during a 2.5-hour meeting attended by 200 people, one lady spent five seconds saying that she, personally, would prefer to leave the site untouched.

Virtually the rest of the entire meeting was spent hearing an unbroken consensus to the contrary.

By no reasonable standard is that a variable, Mr Roche. It’s the opposite of a variable. It’s a constant.

* * *

But why would people object to the excavation solution? There are probably two reasons.

Firstly, no doubt some of the resistance comes from a residual sense of deference towards the Catholic church. Some of this will be from genuinely devout but nonetheless guilt-ridden mass-going locals, but some will be from the subset of Holy Joes (and Josephines) in the Irish civil service who’d rather the authorities not get involved in highlighting the atrocities of Catholic abuses in Ireland. (I’m just guessing here, of course. Maybe there are none of these people at all.)

Secondly, I assume the issue of financial cost will also come into play somewhere. I heard from that BBC podcast that the excavation might cost €5 million or so. I guess the government might not feel they have that type of cash to spend on such a process.

So maybe, and again I’m just guessing here, maybe the costs might not be a convincing barrier after all. I mean, investigation and resolution of the Tuam Babies scandal is important to the Irish people, right?

Right?

* * *

By the way, here’s what real countries do when they discover mass unmarked graves, even when relating to fraught and troubling periods of their history:

(HT: @bansheebabe)

You see, it can be done.

If you want to make your own feelings known to Minister Zappone, you can hit her up on Twitter here. I’m sure she’s a good person. Let’s hope she makes a good decision.

But in the end, it’s not even clear it’s her decision to make. This is a potential criminal justice matter. We don’t get to decide what happens by conducting a survey.

* * *

As I feebly said at last night’s meeting myself, if the site in Tuam is left alone and not properly excavated, then we are just replacing the old scandal with a new one.

The future will look back on 2018 and ask: How could we have been so callous?

The people who were committed to the Tuam Mother and Baby Home were put there by an uncaring society who looked upon them as second-class citizens. They lived their lives as social outcasts.

Let’s stop treating them as second-class citizens just because they’re dead. Let’s stop casting them out.

What crimes exactly have been committed? You have muddied the waters in your article bring sex abuse into the equation. Where is the evidence of this? Would exhuming the bodies confirm that sex abuse took place if indeed it did. When penning your article why not stick to the facts and not wander off the point. This is an issue where the question is whether to excavate or not. Now let’s be clear I would not for one minute put forward that what happened was right. It was not. Having said that this is a complex issue. This was 40,50,60 years ago. A different society with different values and even if they were wrong practices. Off course there needed to a discussion. What would be achieved if an excavation was undertaken? What are the logistics involved? And what is local opinion? In Ireland we are always giving out that we are not consulted and now that a minister did consult she is ridiculed. Tuam is not the only site where this type of practice took place. There right throughout the country. Should we not examine each and everyone of these now too. Tuam was not the only mother and baby home and along side the mother and baby homes we had the industrial schools. One such place exists in letterform where there is a similar buried site. There are also sites like this in ring forts in every village and parish of this country in ancient buriel grounds where unbabtised children were buried in unknown ggravws. These sites are know locally as a cillin or a rath or a liss and were are the time unconsecrated grounds. Some still are. For the most part the graves in these are unmarked. Shouldnt all of these be now examined and documented and excavated?

Hello Michael, thank you for taking time to comment. You asked a number of questions. Let me reply to them.

1. “What crimes exactly have been committed?”

Well, firstly, it is illegal to bury bodies in unmarked graves or unofficial cemeteries. Up to 2011 it was illegal to bury bodies without coffins. So the very existence of this burial site is itself evidence of an extensive crime. In addition, the number of bodies and/or DNA retrieved will help with various missing persons investigations. And it will help with investigations regarding illegal adoptions/fake death certs. Finally, as I wrote in my article, the exhumation of remains from unmarked graves is normally done in order to gather further evidence of potential criminality. It’s a normal thing to do.

2. “You have muddied the waters in your article bring[ing] sex abuse into the equation.”

I did not bring sex abuse into the equation. I never mentioned sex abuse. I never referred to it directly or indirectly. I talked about “abuse”. Not all abuse is sex abuse.

3. “This was 40,50,60 years ago. A different society with different values”.

I don’t agree with this at all. For one thing, 40 years is not that long ago. Laws (such as those relating to burying bodies) were in existence and were broken. Secondly, I understand that religious principles (such as those of Christianity) are meant to be perennial. If 40 years is all it takes for value-systems to become obsolete, then why do religious orders exist? Surely the Bible, which is 2,000 years old, would now be irrelevant? Of course, the real point is that I just disagree with you: values don’t change in this way across time. In the 1950s, Ireland was still Ireland, humans were still humans, morality was still morality, abuse was still abuse. Same society, same values.

4. “What would be achieved if an excavation was undertaken?”

See above. It is normal to excavate when human remains are found.

5. “What are the logistics involved?”

I don’t know. But as I showed in my article (when referring to the excavation this month in Texas), this type of work takes place all the time. And, given the public consultation by Minister Zappone, it is clear the Irish government feel it is logistically feasible. Otherwise they wouldn’t be considering it an option.

6. “And what is local opinion?”

I ask that you re-read my article here. On Monday, local opinion was loud and clear: excavate. But besides that, local opinion should never drive the direction of a criminal investigation. I am from Tuam, but it is simply not for me to decide. Of course not. Please re-read the points in my article.

7. “…now that a minister did consult she is ridiculed.”

I did not ridicule the minister. On the contrary, I said she was “a good person” and that “In fairness, it seemed to me that Minister Zappone personally wants to have all the remains exhumed.” I am sympathetic to her position. I understand that in a long blog post it is difficult to catch every point, but I urge you to re-read it so that you can appreciate where I am coming from.

8. “Shouldnt all of these be now examined and documented and excavated?”

Yes, wherever possible. And it is certainly possible in Tuam.

Michael, thank you again for taking time to comment. I appreciate it. I hope I have responded to your main points above.
Brian.